Quote from the article: "Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years."
Don McGowan is a legend though, a legendary asshole for being proud of bullying a curious kid that was poking around in legally obtained game-files.
If the corporations don't want stuff like this to be found, they should try not putting it into the game in the first place. I guess copyright monopolists who are delusional enough to believe they can publish information world wide and control what happens to it do not have this sort of common sense.
For the record, there's an entire website full of people dedicated to doing what that child did:
This was my first thought too. While the entire DMCA is misguided draconian bullshit, I'm having trouble figuring out by what tortured logic dumping an image from a game file would trigger it.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726866/missouri-govern...
b) With the way politics is going in USA I am not optimistic about DMCA reform until the heat-death of the universe.
In December 1996, the World Intellectual Property Organization adopted the WIPO Copyright Treaty which is principally aimed at adapting the legal paradigm of copyrights to new technology. Article 11 of the WCT obligates “contracting parties to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.”
Yes. But not all countries interpret the restrictions on fair-use as aggressively as DMCA/1201 does.
>So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’
>The kid was live-tweeting it. The tweets were this:
>1.Pokémon just called my house. >2.What the hell is a general counsel? >3.I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.
>Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years.
Yeah, the DMCA is bullshittery, but it's a legal weapon that the GC is expect to wield for his company.
He did his job, in a way that had no legal consequences for the kid, and still got the result his company needed.
That seems like the correct way of handling it. Is it ideal from a societal perspective? No, the DMCA should be gutted. But from a practical perspective, this was a win all around.
And the kid was hopefully pushed away from trouble, at least until they were old enough to cover their tracks better.
No.
This kid did nothing wrong.
Yet he still felt the need to say these words:
> I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.
He lost some of his dignity that day. He was made to submit. To some rich corporation's will. Despite probably having zero obligation to do so.
I couldn't care less what your job is or what "results" your employer wants out of you. If you do what this guy did, you suck.
A company made a mistake. A kid found out. So the company sicks the lawyers on the kid? Teaches the kid to not be curious? Does he really believe kids should only sit down and mindlessly consume content,only when a bigcorp dictates it, never walking a millimeter from the path? And then the bastard lawyer brags about it?
My blood boils just reading this. I hope that corporate creep never has any kids of his own.
Why do you assume there weren't knock-on effects/consequences to his actions? Or that they were positive (set him on the right track) vs deleterious?